I honestly have little to no idea what I'm doing ish... please help!

I'm afraid, there is no quick, simple fix.

Given that BDO, like every other DX9-based Asian MMO on the market today, will hammer the CPU like there is no tomorrow, what's holding you back, is entirely your CPU.

For a brief explanation, the load distribution of these types of MMO's is very different from the average game. There are all the environmental factors, other players, their interactions with the world, constant updating of all this stuff via the internet, audio, player models, physics, particles, LOD, animations, the list goes on and on. All of these things are handled by your CPU. The GPU handles textures and lighting, and otherwise has nothing much to do. Thus, the CPU very quickly gets overwhelmed by how much stuff it has to do at the same time for the game, let alone what it needs to do for the rest of the computer, like process all your inputs, push frames to the GPU to render (actually really important), run the OS, etc.

On the flip side, most modern games based on a single-player experience, like story mode battlefield and COD, metro, tomb raider, etc., don't need to do most of these things, since they're coded for well-optimized machines and not the vast variety of internet cafe PC's, and thus have the GPU do most of the work, including physics and player models and even sometimes the audio. There are no extra variables that need to be updated in real time because they aren't multiplayer. In this case, all the CPU has to do is run the game engine and push frame calls to the GPU, since everything else is already set in stone. Two very different workloads for two very different kinds of games. This is an over-simplification, but I hope you get the idea.

Now you say you don't want to change from AMD, so I can safely say, there is no fix. The problem is the underlying architecture of every AMD CPU from the past 5-6 years. No amount of massaging or phat stacks of cash is going to fix it. Take it from someone who has previously owned, run, and overclocked the living daylights out of a 965BE, Athlon 760k (similar to what you are currently using), and an FX8320, with the latter two either at or exceeding 5ghz. Remember that no matter how fast your GPU is, the CPU has to tell the GPU to render each and every frame. If the CPU is already hammered to death and beyond, these frames are going to come later and later, resulting in low fps and high latency. And thus is the problem every MMO player has with low framerate and lag.

Seeing as you're unwilling to change the motherboard, and by association, unwilling to change the CPU, no one can help you here.